In this blog we discuss Old Testament, women in the church and home, afterlife experiences, and the paranormal. Author, Dust or Dew. Also, see my story on www.coloradowreckchasing.com where I describe the mysterious crash of a UAL crash in 1951 on Crystal Mt. CO.

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Sunday, July 22, 2012

The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Book of Job and several Psalms in
the Hebrew Bible echo the dark and dreary Mesopotamian/Canaanite view of death.
In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh’s beloved friend Enkidu receives a
premonition of his death in a dream. He describes his immanent fate to
Gilgamesh. This passage can be found in Ancient
Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (ANET), 1950, p. 87, but a
more lay-friendly version is found in The
Epic of Gilgamesh by N. K. Sandars, Penguin, 1983.

“As Enkidu slept alone in his sickness, in bitterness of
spirit he poured out his heart to his friend. ‘It was I who cut down the cedar,
who leveled the forest, I who slew Humbaba and now see what has become of me.
Listen, my friend, this is the dream I dreamed last night. The heavens roared,
and earth rumbled back an answer; between them stood I before an awful being,
the somber-faced man-bird; he had directed on me his purpose. His was a vampire
face, his foot was a lion’s foot, his hand was an eagle’s talon. He fell on me
and his claws were in my hair, he held me fast and I smothered; then he
transformed me so that my arms became wings covered with feathers. He turned
his stare towards me, and he led me away to the palace of Irkalla, the Queen of
Darkness, to the house from which none who enters ever returns, down the road
from which there is no coming back.’”

The legend tells us that the people there, including the
kings of the earth, sit in darkness, eating dust and clay. The kings are
servants now. Priests, acolytes, temple servers, all shared the same fate. Eresh-Kigal
is the Queen of the Netherworld, and Belit-Sheri is the recorder who keeps the
book of death. Enkidu awoke in terror. He began to sicken and eventually die.
Gilgamesh, who was two-thirds god and one-third man (ANET 88), could do nothing to help, and in fact, became terrified
of death himself.

Gilgamesh went on a quest to find eternal life. This gift
was denied him, but, in some renditions of the legend (actually a later
appendage), he did have one more opportunity to communicate with his friend. Gilgamesh
lost a magic drum and drumstick into the Netherworld, so he sent his good buddy
there to rescue it. But the Netherworld would not let Enkidu return to earth. Turning
to ANET (pp. 98, 99) we read, (and
I’m going to smooth this passage out a little),

“Father Ea did intercede for him (Gilgamesh) in the matter.
He said to Nergal, the valiant hero: O valiant hero, Nergal, open forthwith a
hole in the earth that the spirit of Enkidu may ussue forth from the nether
world, that to his brother he might tell the ways of the nether world. Nergal,
the valiant hero, hearkened to Ea, forthwith he opened a hole in the earth. The
spirit of Enkidu, like a wind-puff, issued forth from the nether world. They
embraced and kissed each other. They exchanged counsel sighing at each other:
‘Tell me, my friend, tell me my friend, tell me the order of the nether world
which thou hast seen.’

‘I shall not tell thee, I shall not tell thee. But if I tell
thee the order of the nether world which I have seen, sit thou down and weep!’
‘I will sit down and weep.’ ‘My body, which thou didst touch as thy heart
rejoiced, vermin devour as though it was an old garment. My body, which thou
didst touch as they heart rejoiced, is filled with dust.’ He cried ‘Woe!’ and
threw himself in the dust, Gilgamesh cried ‘Woe!’ and threw himself in the
dust.”

There are some mutilated lines here. Enkidu reveals the fate
of several souls in the nether world. Some are able to drink water, others eat
bread. But those who died on the field of battle and were not properly buried
find no rest there. Those who have no family to offer libations for them can
only eat “the lees of the pot, crumbs of bread, and offals of the street.”

OK, I know, the above legend is a figment of someone’s
imagination. BUT the great guru of astral projection Robert Monroe had an
experience in his ethereal wanderings that reminds me of that legend. As he
became more and more adept at leaving his body, he kept a journal about what
worked and what he saw. The result was three books. The first was Journeys Out of the Body, in which he
describes various locales or levels. Level II is where many souls linger that
have not resolved their attachment to desires and emotions. Being in that level
unhinges both libido and emotions, so that it takes a lot of control not to
partake in that environment. He tells us that it is not a pleasant place.

A friend of his died at the age of seventy, so Monroe went
looking for him in the afterlife. He saw him as a young man of 22 talking
excitedly about some scientific theory. Strangely enough, as Monroe stood in
the doorway watching his friend, the atmosphere got hotter and hotter, until
Monroe could no longer stand it. He had to leave without a satisfactory visit
(p.107). That suggests to me that the friend was not really in a good place.
Another of his friends died, and again Monroe went looking for him. In both
cases, an unseen hand guided Monroe to the correct site.

“After about an hour of preparation, I finally made it out
of the physical, and began to travel rapidly through what seemed to be nothing
but darkness. I was mentally shouting Agnew Bahnson!, again and again as I
traveled.

Suddenly, I stopped, or was
stopped. I was in a rather dark room. Someone was holding me very still in a
standing position. After a moment of waiting, a cloud of white gas seemed to
blow up through a small hole in the floor. The cloud took form, and someone
told me it was Mr. Bahnson, although I could not see him too well, or identify
his features. He spoke immediately in an excited and happy way.

‘Bob, you’ll never believe all the things that have happened
since I’ve been here.’ There was no more. At a signal from someone, the cloud
of white gas lost its human form and seemed to recede back into the hole in the
floor” (p. 112).

Monroe put his best interpretation on these scenarios, but
the fact is that there is a growing mountain of evidence that many crossing
over into death see gardens, meadows, beautiful colors, relatives who are easy
to recognize, buildings, animals, streams, rivers, etc. A cloud of white gas
coming up from a hole in the floor into a dim room does not sound auspicious to
me, no matter what the voice said.

Monroe traveled through many threatening and confusing
regions in his astral projections. There were sexually seducing spirits,
threatening entities whose territories had to be passed through with great
care, and lost souls who needed rescued. He met spirit guides who assured him
that there were no angels, no demons, no heaven, no hell, no God (e.g. p. 116).
Not once does he stop to question the veracity of the things that he saw and
heard over there. He doesn’t consider that uncountable numbers of people have
seen angels, demons, God, Jesus, heaven, hell, and even foreign gods sitting on
thrones. He is certainly not the only mortal who has gone into death’s dimension
and returned to tell about it. (There are too many books on NDE’s to even
mention here.) He never stops to ask the question, could my friend have gone to
hell? And if my friends have gone there, am I really exempt?

Almost everyone who has received some guidance from another
dimension totally trusts the guide. If it’s paranormal, it has to be true.
Other people might be sucked into a huge deception, but not me. I’m special and
wise, called to be a messenger of truth.

Think about it this way. If you, as an untrained,
unprofessional spy, decided to go off to Europe and look for traitors and
enemies of your country, how long would it take for the real spies to turn you
inside out and eat your liver? Not long, I would guess. And those guys are
amateurs compared to demonic entities who are cut off from all goodness. They
are the enemies of all mankind. We cannot withstand our enemies if we don’t
understand them.

Monday, July 16, 2012

Today I received a comment, which I will not be publishing, about Dr. John Lerma, author of 'Into the Light' and 'Learning From the Light.' I have two blog posts about his books in which I express a little skepticism, not about the quality of the stories he shares, but about the quantity of angelic visitations and revelations. I had to ask, did he elaborate just a bit in the telling.

Today's comment averred that he does not exist, that he is a fictional character made up to sell books, and that the medical institutions that he claims to have worked for either don't exist or have no record of him. So, I checked the back of his book and called the AMA to see is he is listed there. He was not. I called The Medical Center of Houston. It certainly does exist, and I talked to Sonja in the Hospice department. She said that Dr. Lerma hasn't worked there for about 5 years, but that he did work there in the past. He went by the names of John and Juan.

I asked her if she had read his books. She started one of them, but someone borrowed it and that was the last she ever saw of it. I then asked if there was as much angelic or paranormal activity there in the hospice as Lerma reports. She said that she has worked there for 20 years and has heard and seen quite a bit. For one thing, when she moved into the particular office where she is at now, she kept hearing a baby crying over in the corner by the window. Only certain staff persons had ever heard it and they thought they were going nuts until Sonja verified that she heard it, too. After a few months, the crying went away.

I gave her my email address and asked her to share some of her stories. I really would love to hear them. Anyway, comments are dear to a blogger's heart, but the last two were unpublishable. The other comment from a different reader was about the benefits and joys of voodoo and other kinds of hoodoo. All I can say is, whatever benefit one would get from voodoo will be lost in a very dark end. The nations where voodoo is popular are wallowing in poverty and misery. The malicious and deceptive entities behind voodoo are not in the business of making anyone's life better. Their purpose is to destroy. They will do it by any means possible, including the old serpents song of 'here's a quick fix, here is instant gratification, here are the desires of your heart now.' When you are in hospice and all the things of this world have passed away, what you don't want is the voodoo demons coming to call in that lifelong debt.

Saturday, July 7, 2012

It has been a while since I’ve continued my recent blog
series on negative NDE’s. Ted and I have been traveling, camping, and visiting
friends since June 23. We have visited several National Parks, including
Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Zion, Bryce, Capitol Reef, Canyonlands, Arches, Rocky
Mountain National Park, and Cedar Breaks National Monument. Our ultimate goal
was to visit Ft. Collins, Colorado, where we were met by Lori Juszak of Ft.
Collins Tours. She led us into the Armadillo Garage, where for a few years
pieces of UAL Flight 610 were stored after the crash on Crystal Mountain, close
to Rocky Mountain National Park. Lori tells me that it was an 81 year old man,
a first responder at the crash site in ‘51, who attended a tour and provided
that snippet of information.

Why was it important? Please refer to my blog post, “Did the
KGB Sabotage a UAL Flight During the Korean War?” Lori’s tours are first and
foremost to preserve the rich history of Ft. Collins. It turned out in the
course of events that several of the local stories she garnered from various
sources were about haunted locations. The Armadillo Garage was one of those
locals. There were three suicides and a murder associated with the property.
Plus the crash connection.

On one of Lori’s tours, a teenage boy had an iOvilus
application on his phone. The tour guides do not allow communication with the
spirits that seem to inhabit certain spots, but if someone has an EVP recorder
or iOvilus app, they don’t object if they use them. In fact, Lori now has one,
mostly due to the interesting words that came through on that unique occasion.

Yesterday, I had Lori write down the words. The young lad’s
app: fly, explode, highjack, suppress, metal. Lori downloaded the app on her
phone then and there. On Lori’s app, Korea, atom. Lori just dismissed the whole
thing because she had no idea what any of it meant and thought it was just
random words. Later still, the word crystal appeared. On all of these
occasions, no one really knew anything about the ’51 crash or my research and
my theory that the plane was hijacked. Or that it crashed on Crystal Mountain. It
was later research, my account on www.coloradowreckchasing.com, and
our subsequent correspondence that helped them put it all together. A woman
named Erika F. from Ft. Collins wrote me out of the blue and told me about
those serendipitous events. She was a student in one of Lori’s classes on the
paranormal.

Yesterday, Lori showed me how the $2 app works. You turn it
on and words begin to appear. I saw four appear while she stood and explained
what it does. Sometimes a computer voice will pronounce a word or two. Lori
told me that when they actually use EVP recorders, the spirits call the women
‘lizards,’ which it turns out is what uncouth men called women of ill repute in
days gone by. There is one place that Lori won’t return to because the door
keeps slamming in her face.

I am not going to buy this app. The reason is that any
communication coming through it is most
likely originating from a lost spirit of some sort. Lori told me that in
the old jail morgue, there is supposed to be the spirit of a little boy. He has
been there for decades or more. So, years after his alleged death, he is still
a child and still trapped in a cluttered, dirty, dark cellar. Perhaps it’s not
a child at all, but something pretending to be in order to garner attention and
manipulate the living. Whatever the answer is, this is an entity that is not
‘in the light.’ These electronic devices are fascinating, but they may be ‘the
devil’s sound system’ (words I woke up with this morning).

Lori has written a little book called The Ghosts of Ft. Collins. Dad’s story made it into the book at the
very last minute. Information about the Flight 610 crash is sparse in that
book, but she is interested in learning all she can about the crash (and so am
I) and will include more information in her next book called The Hidden History, which will expand on
forgotten stories from this charming little town. I am hoping to pick up my copy of the first book tomorrow.

We will be traveling until the 11th, so I may not be
blogging again until after that. But I thought I would end this post with a
poem that I wrote when I was attending the University of Washington (c. 1964).
My dorm room overlooked Lake Washington. I sat staring that the majestic view,
focusing only on my curiosity about death and afterlife and my deceased father.
A picture formed in my head. My dad standing on a hill that represented death
and a flagpole with a flyer’s leather jacket, all tattered and torn. This is
what I wrote.

We saw him standing on a hill alone,

A man reluctantly accepting death.

A last look back. He winked, “I can see the other side.”

Then gone he was, his memory flapping in a dying wind.

The sun cares not to teach, or cannot

When I question the wind-breath.

And I wish my soul could find that hill

On which our hopes are pinned.

First of all, I thought it was cool that ‘wind’ and ‘pinned’
rhymed. It just sort of worked out that way. Then I almost erased the word
‘wind-breath’ about five times. Finally I thought to leave it because although
I had no idea what it meant or where it came from, it felt right. So, the poem
seems to be about the depressing futility of searching for ineffable truth. I
folded it up, tucked it away in my wallet, and forgot about it.

BUT, not too long after writing that poem I turned in my
agnosticism for a commitment to Jesus Christ. Soon I was reading books on
theology. One of them discussed the ruach
Elohim, the Spirit of God or Holy Spirit. The word means ‘wind,’ ‘breath,’
or ‘spirit.’ The book actually used the word, ‘wind-breath.’ I thought, ‘where
have I heard that word. It seems so familiar.’ Then I opened my wallet and
re-read the poem for the first time since I wrote it.

So dad made it. When he winked at me in 1964 or ‘65, I knew
beyond all shadow of a doubt that he wanted me to know that what he saw on the
other side was OK. So I can rest easy that my dad, the captain of UAL 610, is
not a mournful spirit trapped in a junky old garage. He is resting with my Lord
and I’ll see him again someday. In the meantime, it's time for me to finish writing the story of my own research on the topic!

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About Me

Received Ph.D. in Biblical Studies from Union Institute & University (Cincinnati) in 2009. Dissertation was published by Wipf & Stock. See amazon.com for Dust or Dew: Immortality in the Ancient Near East and in Psalm 49. Very academic. But, new book, Psalm 49 and the Path to Redemption, published 8-2017, is written at lay level.